Disneyland® Paris

This was truly one of the worst user experiences I’ve had in an app. Had it been a second rate company producing it, perhaps I could uunderstand, but I expect A LOT more from Disney. Among the reasons the UX is terrible, the most obviously easily fixed is that the app throws up a landing screen and forces a full data refresh each time it goes out of focus. This means that if you aren’t able to get onto the Disney WiFi (which happened to us), you are at the mercy of the terrible 4G or worse network. We often waited 30 sec or more for the data to refresh just to see the map of the park. Let me be clear- JUST to see a map (forget location data), the apps data must be refreshed and you just have to wait. To move from an example of a big to an example of a small issue, Disney disables the paste function for entering by ticket numbers. Quite a small issue, but when the ticket number is about 25 numbers long (with no spaces or hyphens or anything), typing them in one by one is just awful. And yes, in theory the tickets could go into my phones wallet, but once again, Disney’s tech failed and for whatever reason wouldn’t actually put the tix in my wallet. The final example I will publish is the repeated bad directions / location the app would give. Multiple times the app rerouted me on an incorrect path because it got confused about where I was standing. Many 7 min walks turned into 15 because of this issue. The good news for Disney is that you are a captive audience and they have no actual incentive to make this app not awful. And for you, well, you have literally zero alternative to just putting up with the nonsense.

Easy to use. for the most part, this app was pretty easy and accurate. It was helpful to know the wait times and shows and parades. The user interface might not be perfect but it got the job done. We had an amazing time at Disneyland, Paris.

Seriously, all that revenue, Disneyland Paris couldn’t hire a competent developer to make an app that has easy to use UX, actual helpful map/direction with real time GPS ping, that doesn’t lag to the point the user think the app is frozen? I have been in app software development for 15 years, this surprised me how bad it is. Every park employee acknowledges that it is useless. This is my first time to Disneyland Paris, with the unfriendly UX, clunky response and lack of real time ping, I would not want to visit just for the terrible app experience. I had to resort to a paper map. From what I can tell, so did everyone else at the park.